JAZZ CITY

Grace Cathedral, a soaring Gothic space, the tall arches and stone columns of its interior illuminated by a filigree of spotlights, is filled with a hushed, attentive crowd. In the front of the cathedral, jazz bassist Charlie Haden stands alone on a raised platform; behind him, a colorful, handmade Hindu tapestry hangs as a backdrop.

Haden begins to play--soft phrases at first, which slowly evolve into a dark, minor-key theme. After a few beats, he is joined by a wailing alto saxophone from the rear of the cathedral, the passionate sound reverberating through the chamber’s long, unfolding echoes. The song is “Lonely Woman,” a mournful, keening melody composed by avant-garde saxophonist Ornette Coleman--one of Haden’s first employers--and it is performed by Dewey Redman, a survivor of the edgy jazz of the ‘60s.

The performance last Saturday, a key event in this year’s 14th installment of the San Francisco Jazz Festival, was a tribute to trumpeter Don Cherry (who died a year ago). And the choice of Cherry, an eclectic artist associated with the cutting edge of jazz and world music, but hardly a major figure, was only one of the typically imaginative elements in the festival’s inventive lineup of programming.

Across the street from the reverberating sounds of the cathedral, in the Masonic Auditorium, a full house of jazz enthusiasts was being entertained by the considerably busier contemporary jazz of the David Sanborn Group and the ambidextrous guitar playing of Charlie Hunter.

On Friday night, the Masonic Auditorium presented “A Stride Piano Summit,” with a group of veteran jazz pianists--Dr. Billy Taylor, Dick Hyman and Ralph Sutton among them--in a fast-fingered program subtitled “The Legacy of Fats Waller.”

On the same evening, at Bimbo’s 365 Club--a large, ‘40s-style nightclub that has gone through a colorful array of permutations over the past decades--a packed crowd cheered a performance by singer Deborah Harry (who once led the group Blondie) and the Jazz Passengers. The group’s music was filled with contemporized, funk-driven, often whimsical reworkings of material from the standard lexicon of jazz ballads and rhythm tunes. Also on the bill, saxophonist-pianist Peter Apfelbaum, one of the city’s best-known avant-garde jazz players, delivered a performance that juxtaposed clattery “outside” playing with rock-tinged rhythms.

Is it any wonder that San Francisco is rapidly gaining the title of “Jazz City”?

The annual jazz festival events bring a great deal of national focus to the Bay Area’s cornucopia of sounds, and with good cause. But what quickly becomes apparent to anyone who visits San Francisco for the festival is the fact that the programs, for all their visibility and importance, represent only one aspect of the area’s extensive involvement with jazz.

Beyond the festival are the far-ranging jazz styles and attitudes heard in dozens of local clubs, all existing comfortably in a city with a reputation for uncompromising receptivity to individual differences. Equally important, access to music is relatively easy. San Francisco, like the borough of Manhattan in New York, is a relatively compact city center, and its public transportation and prolific taxi service allow the kind of easy club-hopping that is far more difficult in the spread-out environs of Los Angeles.

“The way we see it,” says Dimitri Matheny, director of corporate relations for the festival and a jazz trumpeter in his own right, “is that we should reflect the character of San Francisco as a city. People come here because they feel this is a safe place to be themselves, to be as unique and individual as they want to be. And the music of the festival is put together the same way, with a belief in the values of uniqueness and individuality.”

On other nights, the week-and-a-half festival included such major headliners as Sonny Rollins, George Shearing and Max Roach; emerging stars Leon Parker, Charlie Hunter and Jacky Terrasson; singers Dee Dee Bridgewater, Diana Krall and Mark Murphy; a “B-3 Organ Summit” with Jack McDuff and Shirley Scott; a “Roots & Blues” evening with John Lee Hooker and Ruth Brown; and “Backyard Alchemy,” a pair of consecutive nights devoted to the burgeoning number of innovative young bands in the Bay Area’s expansive and creatively tolerant jazz scene.

Appropriately, since San Francisco’s large Asian population has made the area a particularly active arena for Asian American jazz, one of the more challenging programs, “Silk Road: Asian Concepts in Jazz,” featured tabla player Zakir Hussain and bassist/Chinese instrumentalist Mark Izu in a performance that signaled the emergence of a potentially influential new jazz style.

“We always try to include what we call a ‘wild card’ in each festival, just to keep things interesting,” explained festival Director Randall Kline. “And not just for the audiences, but for our production staff as well, because those are the kind of events that have to really be worked.”

“Wild card” events in past festivals have included such disparate programs as a performance of the Bach cello sonatas and last year’s multimedia “Tone Dialing” by Ornette Coleman. The latter event featured the saxophonist’s acoustic and electric group as well as extensive video projections, poetry and--in a particularly controversial segment--onstage, ritualized body piercing.

This year’s “wild card,” in a kind of whimsical flip-flop, was the Sanborn concert--a contemporary jazz concert of the sort not usually heard at the festival. Ironically, although standard wisdom would seem to indicate that Sanborn would be a larger draw than Coleman, “Tone Dialing” generated a quick response from San Francisco’s creatively discriminating audiences, while the Sanborn concert required an unanticipated extra marketing effort to fill the auditorium.

It’s not surprising that the festival has become a San Francisco fixture. But its success--it has either broken even or turned a profit in virtually every year of its 14-year existence--traces to a well-honed approach to planning, promotion, marketing and sponsorship.

“We started small,” Kline explained, “with some help from the city’s hotel tax. And we’ve now reached the point where we’re budgeted somewhere around $2 million, about 60% of which is generated by our ticket sales.”

Kline’s production team has established a wide range of financial and production support systems to make it all work. Corporate interaction, for example, with sponsors such as American Airlines, Nortel, Nissan, See’s Candies, among many others, is viewed not simply as a sponsor/advertising relationship. Instead, Matheny encourages corporations to participate in a more direct manner, using the festival as a showcase and entertainment venue for important corporate clients.

In another program, fans can participate in a festival membership participation at levels that range from $25 to $50 to $100 and on up to $5,000. Benefits of membership rise at each level, beginning with advance information about programs, early opportunities to buy tickets, discounts on merchandise at the Festival Store & Gallery, and, at the highest levels, invitations to private artist receptions and options to purchase additional tickets.

The Festival Store & Gallery, located at Four Embarcadero Center, is open for several months around festival time, offering a complete line of festival-oriented merchandise, as well as a showing of black-and-white photographs by jazz photographer Lee Tanner. Across from the store are the new festival offices--home base for 10 year-round employees, numerous part-time help and dozens of volunteers.

With the luxury of a nearly two-week run--unlike L.A.’s primary jazz event, the Playboy Jazz Festival, which is limited (except for its pre-festival program of local, free concerts) to a single weekend--the San Francisco Festival takes place in venues all around the Bay Area. In addition to the locations already mentioned, performances take place in halls such as the Herbst Theatre in the Civic Center, the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, the Florence Gould Theatre, the Paramount Theatre in Oakland and on a bay cruise (featuring the music of Duke Ellington).

Clustered around the festival--separate, yet intrinsic to the uniqueness and individuality mentioned by Matheny--are the many clubs and theaters supporting San Francisco’s New Jazz scene, one of the country’s most energized arenas for young players. In areas such as the SoMa (South of Market) warehouse district, the Mission district, in clubs such as Bimbo’s, Bruno’s, Jazz at Pearl’s and small theatrical locales such as Venue 9, musicians are working their way through every permutation of post-bebop jazz.

In yet another ancillary aspect of the jazz festival, the San Francisco Chapter of the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences held a panel discussion on “The State of Jazz in the Bay Area” at Yoshi’s, the area’s major room for top-name performers, located in Oakland. Once again, diversity ruled, with few of the panelists agreeing on much of anything, although all were convinced that San Francisco is rapidly becoming one of the most important jazz arenas in the country.

Kline, who was on the panel, expresses little interest in such sweeping generalizations. The San Francisco Jazz Festival, he believes, works because of the way it is run and the programs it produces are reflective of the city in which it takes place.

“You couldn’t do this kind of festival in Los Angeles,” he says, “because it’s simply a different place. If we were to try to mount a festival down there, we’d take a look at what is unique and special about L.A.--like its multiethnic, multiracial communities, for example--and build a festival from the local perspective.”

“The bottom line,” adds publicity and marketing director Ann Dyer (a highly praised Bay Area singer who performed in the “Backyard Alchemy” program), “is that building a festival, anywhere, is hard work. But beyond the hard work, for me it all keeps coming back to this city, to its tolerance of individual ideas, its artistic sophistication, and to the simple fact that you can easily hop around from one club to another. San Francisco may not be the perfect jazz city, but I’d say it’s pretty close.”

* The 14th annual San Francisco Jazz Festival continues through Sunday, with an additional special event, “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: The Songs of Johnny Mercer,” at the Masonic Auditorium, Nov. 15. Ticket prices vary; available at BASS Ticket outlets, (415) 776-1999. Festival information hotline: (415) 788-SFJF.